A company with a large customer base has a monthly practice of measuring its performance on quality and customer-related metrics. These are reviewed by the CEO and the rest of the senior management team. These metrics are part of senior management’s arsenal of performance appraisal tools.

Among the important measures that form part of this monthly review are those related to customer complaints. One is the percent of complaints that were resolved within the target time the company had set for itself. Month after month, the performance graphs showed more than 99-percent on-time resolution. The source for these data was the company’s customer relations management (CRM) system, in which all queries, requests, and complaints from customers are entered and tracked until resolution. Consistently, month after month, more than 99-percent of the complaints were reported as resolved on time.

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